How sunscreen became the subject of troubling conspiracy theories.
By Katie Rosseinsky / 24 August 2025
A man clutching a tiny microphone strides purposefully towards the sun care aisle in his local pharmacy. He picks up the orange and yellow bottles, scans the labels and quickly, performatively rejects them with a pantomime shake of the head. Why? Because he’s convinced that sunscreen is filled with “toxic chemicals” that, he claims, are “doing more harm than good”. And if you watch his video for long enough, he’ll probably start recommending the “natural” option he's switched to instead. He might even (falsely) claim that, rather than protecting you from skin cancer, sunscreen increases the risk.
Variations on this scene are cropping up on social media with alarming frequency. Over on TikTok, this backlash against SPF (sun protection factor), known as the “anti-sunscreen movement”, has been brewing for a couple of years, but in the summer of 2025, it seems to have moved from a conspiratorial niche into something more mainstream
